What is so damn sexy about my childhood that so many people want to rape the shit out of it?

This paraphrased title brought to you by obediah. He wasn’t talking about literal rape and childhood, but here we are.

It was first Radley Balko’s blog that brought this from William Saletan from Slate to my attention. In it the human-nature pundit discusses how age-of-consent laws lock up young adults not yet capable of the emotional maturity to behave as we would like in their actions with those who are treated as adults by their biology but as children by the law (cue John Derbyshire on the difference between ephebophilia and pedophilia). As Balko notes, there is slim chance of the laws being changed to reflect this. There’s a reason the Simpsons’ line “Won’t somebody think of the children!?” sounds familiar. It is also the case, as Saletan admits, that there is no clear line for legislators to make that separates people into distinct groups. I have previously stated that I would like to see the young incarcerated merely because I dislike them (being young myself, armchair psychologists will likely call “projection”), but I do not mean this seriously. Part of being a libertarian is recognizing that public policy is not a fantasy story in which you may enact your whims, especially the more spiteful ones. I do not have much in the way of suggestions for dealing with the young, only gratitude that I am not responsible for any myself.

On from statutory rape of the young to full-on violent rejection of the necessity of consent. The first in a series of posts from the print edition of the Hoover Hog is called Writing About Prostitutes. It’s not all that accurate a title, as only the ending section about Wendy McElroy’s “XXX” really discusses them. Most of it is about rape and pornography. If you expect issue #4 of Jim Goad’s “Answer Me!” to pop up, you’ve done your homework. The first part concerns Andrea Dworkin, whose detection of rape everywhere she looked has been mocked to no end. Chip Smith’s approach is more along the lines of John Dolan. There is sympathy and pity for her, along with the standard “don’t agree with her” disclaimer which is not the standard feminist triangulation to acceptable center of discourse but a diagnosis of her ideas being those of a sadly deranged person. The main course is on Peter Sotos, a transgressive writer and the first person convicted for possession of child pornography. He called his publication “Pure” because it contained the most extreme first-person accounts of sadistic violence and depravity without any justification or ass-covering. It was because of this that police and psychiatrists were convinced he must have engaged in some of the acts described. As is pointed out, among those are the child-abuse rings that never actually existed other than in the minds of authorities that cajoled children into testifying. In an earlier and more religious/superstitious era rather than a serial rapist and murderer of children Sotos would likely have written from the perspective of a demon or monster that haunted the imagination of the folk. I don’t mean to sound like those who think their own era is the near-culmination of history, but I don’t think we will ever look back Sotos’ writings as the sort of harmless playing-on-fears that the spooky stories of the past were, at least as long as they regard us as belonging to the same species. I will admit that I am unqualified to say just how disturbing Sotos is, as I am of the unread and prudish sort (I’ve never even read the respectable stuff like “Lady Chatterly” or “Lolita”), so if someone wants to point out what a chickenshit Sotos is and how apparent it is to anyone who knows jack, feel free.

Finally, while we’re on the topic, where did the “Rape is about power, not sex” idea come from? I often hear the claim as if it is the firmly established consensus of the scientific literature, but I don’t know where it came from and it strikes me as implausible. I discussed this a bit here and didn’t get much of a response.

EDIT: I just noticed this post at Overcoming Bias. It makes me wonder to what extent people deceive themselves about age & consent. Also, how does rape factor into those surveys? If we accepted the claim of widespread unreported rape, this could result in the type of biased reporting by one gender vs the other.

12 Responses to “What is so damn sexy about my childhood that so many people want to rape the shit out of it?”

“This view was first put forward by Millet (1971), Griffin (1971), and Greer (1970). When popularized by Brownmiller (1975), it quickly became the central tenet in the social science explanations of rape.” For full discussion, see pp 124-152 of the MIT Press hardcover edition.

I suspect the idea may have deeper, if less explicit, roots in Foucault, but it would be hard to overestimate the popular influence of Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will.”

Ironically enough, the morning before I read your post and wrote my own I was explaining why the period during which the papacy was controlled by prostitutes is called by historians the “pornocracy“. I’m kicking myself for forgetting it later that day.

I probably won’t be getting to Nabokov. I’ve given up on reading fiction since non-fiction is often more interesting and at the very least once I’ve finished I know something more about the world than I did before. I plan on going back to Franz Oppenheimer’s “The State” and then I promised Mencius Moldbug I’d read Walter Lippman’s “Public Opinion”, both of which are freely available online. I’ll try to check out some of the films you’ve recommended though.

If nothing else, Burgess-Jackson’s article has made me look more carefully at some important conceptual distinctions that invariably crop up in libertarian-flavored discussions of rights and obligations. If they weren’t so blinded by smug self-certainty, those Mises votaries might learn something as well.

Haneke’s stuff is worth the time, I promise. I would start with “The Seventh Continent.”

I’ve just started looking at that article and I note that Aristotle was not mentioned as an example of an ethical egoist. It was sort of the reverse of Rand in that rather than defining good as acting in your self-interest (which somehow includes respecting the rights of others), he said it was in one’s “enlightened” self-interest to live virtuously. I don’t know much about what is supposed to distinguish what is right, virtuous, just or good though from an emotivist perspective none of them really have a meaning other than an expression of approval.

I note that he mentions John Hospers. Hospers has been mentioned (not approvingly) as among the people who have attempted to justify the state. I know Nozick did so in “Anarchy, State and Utopia”, but I don’t know where Hospers did. Do you know?

I was also disappointed not to see any mention of the person best deserving of the title “egoist”, Max Stirner. It is true that Stirner was not an “ethical egoist”, since he didn’t seem to care a whit for whether his actions were good or bad (I like how he appears to grant the existence of God while swearing no fealty to Him). His hostility to fixed ideas would seem to make him opposed to deontological approaches above all, but his explanation of how an egoist might provide alms to a beggar would seem to go well with Burgess-Jackson’s idea that altruism is permitted but not required.

I was also interested to see him state “just as liberty is not vice, libertarianism is not anarchism”, seeing as how Rothbard, Hoppe, Roy Childs and others have proposed theories that would make anarchy morally required.

Ah, now I see he makes a note that libertarians and anarchists are not mutually exclusive.

As I read his discussion on indifference I recalled that the one other school of thought I can remember embracing it is that of the ancient Stoics, though I think they had good, bad and truly indifferent varieties of indifference.

As I got to the part that mentioned divine command theory, I was reminded how disappointed I am that Vox Day is the only person I can name (which is actually Beale) who has stated he would murder innocent children if God told him to. Didn’t we all learn the story of Abraham’s aborted sacrifice in Sunday school? It shows how right Razib is about people not viewing religion in an axiomatic way. I guess that’s how John Dolan felt in Berkeley.

I see that that Burgess-Jackson has a blog dedicated to attacking Brian Leiter, even posting about unpopular people/things that don’t have anything to do with him, just because they are supposed to be just like him. It seems apparent that Leiter is a dislikeable person, but those kind of things are always lame, whether its Leiter, Sailer, Malkin, Instapundit, No Treason, Tom Palmer or whoever with the spotlight on them.

I wasn’t familiar with Burgess-Jackson before reading the DE piece. I stumbled into it when I was trawling around in search of a prescriptivist theory of side constraints.
I will say that the Stirner omission is simply too conspicuous not to have been intentional.

I may follow up on some of your more substantial thoughts and observations later. But for now, sleep beckons.

Oh. Yes, the Brian Leiter blog is just embarrassing. Must be a deep personal grudge. But still, like you said: always lame.

Re-reading your comments with fresh eyes, I see that in my groggy haste I misread your question re Hospers. I have no idea where he expresses his support for the state.

I was re-reading the Burgess-Jackson piece in light of your observations, but seeing as this thread is growing stale, I think I will forgo banking off your comments until the next contextual opportunity comes along. I do have some thoughts, especially wrt “divine command theory,” which may work their way into my next post on antinatalism and abortion. And I have some questions about emotivism, which strikes me as a sound concessional starting point, but little else. Also, I’ve been reading a collection by Hare, “Objective Prescriptions,” I think, and would be very interested in your thoughts on his central idea and, presumably, where it goes wrong.

May I say that you have an enviable knack for clean reduction. Really, very few people can juggle so many mental models without fumbling.

BTW, I know your stance on fiction, but I’m afraid I must recommend John Dolan’s Pleasant Hell. It’s painful and hilarious, and it pretty much convinces me that he’s the “War Nerd.”

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